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glenatronAt last there are hints of spring out in the world - the snowdrops are in full flower and the celandine are starting to open as well. On Saturday morning we watched buzzards on a rapid diving chase over the woods and fields across the valley from the field. Birds are starting to sing out in the trees and hedgerows. Very pleasant.
On Saturday morning Small took![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sleepsy_mouse out for a short ride on the common while Zorro and I did some schooling. He was only a little bit grumpy at first but came through really nicely. Also he did some very bless jumping on line. I don't really have anything to do with jumps but it's one of Steve's basic skills things and so I was having a play with it to see how we got on and Zorro was very bless, picking his feet up and popping over.
After riding, it being sunny and pleasant, we put Zorro out without his rug, for the first time this year. Normally I'm all about letting the ponies to be furry and outside in all weathers but Zorro has been clipped so between that and the cold weather he's been rugged more than usual and this was his first time out without.
He made the best of it and also looked a lot like he was going to just slide off down the hill.
On Sunday we rode at the start of the day, doing a shorter circuit on the common. Zorro was a star and Small did well but seemed quite tired. After last summer we're quite anxious about that one but it's possible he needs a bit more food to help him build up. We're hoping that is enough but the vet is out next week anyways so we can see if they have anything to say. He's also changing diet so we're hopeful that might help a little.
After riding we put them both out unrugged and in spite of having a tractor tyre of hay each they were much more inclined to share.
We had a tasty mothers' day lunch with my parents and then headed back to the ponies. In the evening I thought I could walk home in the last of the light and enjoy the springiness.
Sure enough the punchbowl ponies were being picturesque and I had just enough light to take their picture...
Most of the evenings over the weekend were spent as a consequence of being caught up in a whirlwind of internet drama, which was quite surprising. A few years back we joined a forum with a vaguely natural-horsemanship but broad spectrum approach. It was a good community and had some cool people on it, but the person running the board tended to get a bit down from time to time and in the end closed the whole place down. In order to make sure that could never happen again a couple of regulars from the board set up a replacement forum ( in fact they set up two, of which more shortly ) and we moved collectively over. I joined the admin team for that board, largely for my technical skills, and it went fine. For a couple of years now it's been a friendly and interesting place to visit. We've had some pretty crazy moments ( funny how people who focus exclusively on positive reinforcement seem to be the most intensely negative individuals ) and from time to time generic clicker-training trolls got banned but all in all it ran fine. Then the person who ran the board started to change, I don't really know what happened there and it's not my problem, but I think one of the clicker-training trolls we banned actually deliberately targetted her for intensive manipulation in order to destroy the forum that had banned her. That's my best guess. Either way, she stopped consulting the rest of the admin team, started inviting back people who we had previously banned for not being able to engage in civil conversation with the other board members and generally did some things that we found a little disagreeable. People quit posting because they felt anything they said would just be wailed on, the rest of us administering the site started to step back a little from the work because we didn't want to tread on the board owner's toes and she had apparently decided to take the board in a more aggressive direction.
On Friday she just closed the board, again without consulting any of her administrators, doing exactly the thing that this board was originally created to avoid. Everyone was locked out and as she hadn't seen fit to tell us what was going on, we just set about activating the second board that had been created a couple of years ago. In a weekend we have got the forum up and running and picked up many members of the old community. All the administrators have full access, including the password for the board owner, so it should really be impossible for one person's whimsical actions to close it down this time. Actually properly impossible.
The owner of the board we used to belong to took this pretty badly. She decided we had been scheming to do this all along and made bad things happen in order to deliberately upset her. It's pretty hard to defend yourself against what someone else's imaginary version of you has done, especially if they won't talk to you. It's fine, not my problem at all, but irritatingly unjust and unfair. Also I had hundreds of posts on that forum and now I'm banned and locked out. I'll ask her, I think, to delete them all- I don't want to have people I don't know or trust going over stuff I've said with no right to reply.
Either way, the major consequence is that we have a new horsey forum that we've just started. I'm helping run it and we're aiming to be friendly, open-minded and interesting. Mostly UK based because that's where we're all from but anyone from anywhere who is interested in horse-oriented training and riding - from any background or style - is welcome.
Also, I'm quite pleased with the logo:
On Saturday morning Small took
sleepsy_mouse out for a short ride on the common while Zorro and I did some schooling. He was only a little bit grumpy at first but came through really nicely. Also he did some very bless jumping on line. I don't really have anything to do with jumps but it's one of Steve's basic skills things and so I was having a play with it to see how we got on and Zorro was very bless, picking his feet up and popping over. After riding, it being sunny and pleasant, we put Zorro out without his rug, for the first time this year. Normally I'm all about letting the ponies to be furry and outside in all weathers but Zorro has been clipped so between that and the cold weather he's been rugged more than usual and this was his first time out without.
He made the best of it and also looked a lot like he was going to just slide off down the hill.
On Sunday we rode at the start of the day, doing a shorter circuit on the common. Zorro was a star and Small did well but seemed quite tired. After last summer we're quite anxious about that one but it's possible he needs a bit more food to help him build up. We're hoping that is enough but the vet is out next week anyways so we can see if they have anything to say. He's also changing diet so we're hopeful that might help a little.
After riding we put them both out unrugged and in spite of having a tractor tyre of hay each they were much more inclined to share.
We had a tasty mothers' day lunch with my parents and then headed back to the ponies. In the evening I thought I could walk home in the last of the light and enjoy the springiness.
Sure enough the punchbowl ponies were being picturesque and I had just enough light to take their picture...
Most of the evenings over the weekend were spent as a consequence of being caught up in a whirlwind of internet drama, which was quite surprising. A few years back we joined a forum with a vaguely natural-horsemanship but broad spectrum approach. It was a good community and had some cool people on it, but the person running the board tended to get a bit down from time to time and in the end closed the whole place down. In order to make sure that could never happen again a couple of regulars from the board set up a replacement forum ( in fact they set up two, of which more shortly ) and we moved collectively over. I joined the admin team for that board, largely for my technical skills, and it went fine. For a couple of years now it's been a friendly and interesting place to visit. We've had some pretty crazy moments ( funny how people who focus exclusively on positive reinforcement seem to be the most intensely negative individuals ) and from time to time generic clicker-training trolls got banned but all in all it ran fine. Then the person who ran the board started to change, I don't really know what happened there and it's not my problem, but I think one of the clicker-training trolls we banned actually deliberately targetted her for intensive manipulation in order to destroy the forum that had banned her. That's my best guess. Either way, she stopped consulting the rest of the admin team, started inviting back people who we had previously banned for not being able to engage in civil conversation with the other board members and generally did some things that we found a little disagreeable. People quit posting because they felt anything they said would just be wailed on, the rest of us administering the site started to step back a little from the work because we didn't want to tread on the board owner's toes and she had apparently decided to take the board in a more aggressive direction.
On Friday she just closed the board, again without consulting any of her administrators, doing exactly the thing that this board was originally created to avoid. Everyone was locked out and as she hadn't seen fit to tell us what was going on, we just set about activating the second board that had been created a couple of years ago. In a weekend we have got the forum up and running and picked up many members of the old community. All the administrators have full access, including the password for the board owner, so it should really be impossible for one person's whimsical actions to close it down this time. Actually properly impossible.
The owner of the board we used to belong to took this pretty badly. She decided we had been scheming to do this all along and made bad things happen in order to deliberately upset her. It's pretty hard to defend yourself against what someone else's imaginary version of you has done, especially if they won't talk to you. It's fine, not my problem at all, but irritatingly unjust and unfair. Also I had hundreds of posts on that forum and now I'm banned and locked out. I'll ask her, I think, to delete them all- I don't want to have people I don't know or trust going over stuff I've said with no right to reply.
Either way, the major consequence is that we have a new horsey forum that we've just started. I'm helping run it and we're aiming to be friendly, open-minded and interesting. Mostly UK based because that's where we're all from but anyone from anywhere who is interested in horse-oriented training and riding - from any background or style - is welcome.
Also, I'm quite pleased with the logo:
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Date: 17 Mar 2010 14:15 (UTC)